Alternatives to Private Landownership

Urbanisation has made the urban land question a key societal issue. In recent years, cities have sold the land they own, and research has focused on investigating the harmful effects of privatisation. We explore new solutions to resolve urban problems: producing affordable housing, fighting against land speculation, regulating the real estate market and managing public land. Our research will focus on non-private forms of urban land tenure: religious land to investigate the possibility of ethical land-use decisions; communal land to analyse whether a communal form of tenure promotes trust and integrates the community; collectively owned land to examine whether collective land can be used for common good; and cases where residents were granted land rights in perpetuity to study the temporal aspect of tenure.